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Finally getting round to this post which to be fair I should have done nearly a month ago but I’ve been having the worst kind of writers block recently that’s rendered me almost incapable of writing anything beyond the few characters allowed for a tweet on Twitter. This thankfully seems to be lifting now and so I’m getting down to polishing off some things I really should have done, one of which obviously being this review.

So without further ado, I was sent a set of the Nokia BH-905 Bluetooth stereo headphones to have a play with for a fortnight. Here’s what they look like:

Not small and decidedly classical in form factor is probably the best description. Definitely not designed to be unobtrusive while wearing either and certainly not lightweight. Which incidentally in my case are nice and attractive attributes.

These things aren’t cheap either at a quid shy of Â£200 but they are quality which explains the price tag. I get quite finicky about build quality on almost everything I buy. Nothing irks me more than the feeling something I’ve purchased feels like it’s been knocked out on the cheap to improve a company’s profit margins and I haven’t got a problem with paying that bit extra to get something of quality. That’s why my garden fork is over 40 years old, has a fork made from a single piece of properly forged British steel and a hardened ash wooden handle. It’s as tough as the day it was made and not one of those rubbish welded fork section with handle that’ll break if you use it too much Â£10 jobbies from B&Q.

The BH-905 headset is up there in the quality stakes so it gets a thumbs up on that count. Well constructed, feels solid, no squeaky bits of plastic that I noticed and unlike my old Panasonic headphones, I don’t see the padded ear cushions breaking up and peeling either.

Bits in the box:

Usually when you get a new device or whatever sort it is, there’s a few extras included, maybe connector cable and charger but two thing I did like about the headset wasn’t just that it came with adaptors and connectors for almost all occasions but the box itself or should I say case. Here it is:

Here’s the case open with all the bits and bobs in it too:

I’m not sure what the exterior of the case is made from but again the quality feel comes through. I’m going have a guess at it being leather as opposed to some sort of vinyl coating. I could be wrong but I don’t think Nokia would have appreciated me taking a knife to it to find out. Either way, it’s lovely and I liked it.

The important stuff, actually using it:

A product can look lovely, exude quality but if it performs badly at what it’s supposed to do then it’s pretty much worthless. Equally, in the case of something like headphones any appraisal is highly subjective as the facets being analysed aren’t readily reproducible through the medium of text and pictures so you’re at the mercy of the background knowledge of the person assessing it.

For the record, I used to do sound engineering, it was a long time ago but I think I know the odd thing about how things should sound.

Wearability: (not an actual word in the English language but it should be)

They’re not a light headset at 175grammes so you definitely feel that you’re wearing them. There’s also a slight weight imbalance in them with the left being heavier than the right. I presume this is as the battery is on the left hand side. (must be the battery but happy to be corrected) It’s not a problem, they don’t slip down on the one side because of it or anything like that but it is noticeable (just about). In practical terms it’s irrelevant though. There’s plenty of adjustment settings to fit different sized heads and they sit quite comfortably and firmly in place. Contrasting this to my old Panasonic headphones the BH-905 is great in term of staying where it should and not slipping off.

The padded ear pieces sit nice and comfortably on the ears. They don’t encompass the ear area completely, (and I have relatively small ears) they do let in some external sound around the tragus so we’re not talking passive noise cancellation here which is not so much of a problem as they have an active noise cancellation system. More on that in a bit.

Battery:

I charged it twice in the fortnight I had it and it saw me through plenty of commuting and generally knocking around and using around the house. From a purely user perspective I call that fairly good. The only gripe I would have is that when the battery gets low and music is being played over bluetooth there is a noticeable deterioration in the quality. It simply going dead when it hasn’t got the juice would probably be better from an end user experience.

Sound Quality:

Obviously the most important aspect of an aural related device. I tested it across a wide range of music from classical through to heavy rock and it was very good. I don’t personally go in for music with really heavy bass so I didn’t test it to the extreme in that area but as far as I did test it on bass it performed well. Having a bit of an ear for it, I can tell the difference between music being played back over bluetooth as opposed to a straight wired connection. I’ll be honest on this one, I couldn’t tell the difference with the BH-905, apart from when the battery was running out of course. Overall, very good across all the frequencies that I have the ability to modify on my not so posh hifi.

Active Noise Cancellation:

This is the only headset I’ve ever used that has this so it was a bit of a first and obviously I can’t compare it to anything else in terms of its performance so purely from a subjective point of view I thought it was good. It didn’t cancel out absolutely everything (as in lorries going past me at the bus stop, although it got dangerously close). It did annoy Mrs Penguin as I couldn’t hear her talking to me; I will leave that up to the reader as whether it’s a plus or minus point. However I did enjoy having it on public transport. I will don my grumpy old git hat here but there is nothing more irritating than being forced to listen to the incomprehensible shite that passes for music of da yoof played through pisspoor tinny mobile phone speakers on the bus. Especially when you’re trying to listen to your own music with headphones on and you can still hear theirs. The least they could do is buy a Nokia 5800XM, the music may still be crap but at least it would sound reasonably good on its rather impressive external stereo speakers. Old git rant over. For this alone I really liked the BH-905 headset.

Controls:

All bar the active noise cancellation switch are located on the right side of the headset. They’re easy to use, functional and do the job. Really there’s not much more to say. Good tactile feedback from the clicks but took me a bit of getting used to. I’ll put this down to although being ambidextrous, I tend to favour doing controls with my left hand, just personal preference but I’d hazard a guess the focus of the design would be on right-handed people as they make up the majority.

Criticisms or lack of functions:

I can only really come up with two areas that I would criticise the BH-905 for. When I did a review of the BH-214 bluetooth headset I liked the nifty way it had a 3.5mm audio-out jack meaning it could be plugged into external devices and used to stream content elsewhere. Given the BH-905 is the top of the range, an extra audio-jack socket would have been good. The second criticism I have is the audio-in jack. This is handy because if the battery dies, it can still be used with a direct cable connection although obviously the active noise control doesn’t work then. So I have to ask, why a 2.5mm socket? I can understand them having been used in handsets where space is an absolute premium although almost all now have 3.5mm sockets but it just seems wrong to have a 2.5mm socket on a headset. Apart from that minor point, I enjoyed the headset overall.

Conclusion:

Top notch quality from a build perspective, very good on all the audio fronts and connectivity. I realise I didn’t do a specific section on the bluetooth connectivity but suffice to say, it just worked. Plenty of extras in the box for all occasions. Would definitely suit grumpy old buggers like me who use public transport.

It’s hard to know where to start so in time honoured tradition I’ll break it down into a series of header sections.

Build Quality:

I’m very particular when it comes to build quality, almost slightly obsessive about it but if you’re going to fork out serious money or tie yourself up to a contract till the end of time to get a handset then it would be nice to think it’s well made and isn’t going to fall apart on you.

Here the N97 scores very well. It’s solidly put together, no noticeable plastic creaking noises or loose bits with only one exception. The main menu button on the front I felt had a little too much sideways play to it but apart from that it was solid.

I’ll also note that I did notice a rather large scratch down the camera lens. This was a known (now fixed) issue with the originally produced versions of the N97. This means that the handset I tested out was one of the originals and presumably has been around for quite a while. Despite it’s age I didn’t notice anything like weakness in the screen hinge section which is another good plus for it as I do quite like that form factor design.

Form Factor:

That leads nicely on to the next section. I like elongated phones, I’m not that keen on the squat chubby style phones like Blackberry’s Iphones and even my own N900. I like length and a clearly defined top, bottom and sides layout.

Here it suits me very well and just feels right whether in the hand or pocket, it’s where it should be and no fussing about or confusion.

The snap out hinge system when using it in landscape mode felt very intuitive and a definite plus over a more tradition slide out QWERTY keyboard.

Hardware functionality:

Here I’ll be concentrating solely on the functionality of the hardware of the phone. Its buttons, keys, touch screen and the like. I’ll do software functionality separately.

The QWERTY keyboard:

I’d tried N97′s in shops from time to time since it was launched and I didn’t like it. Bear in mind for most of that period I had a Nokia E90 Communicator which arguably has the best QWERTY keyboard ever plonked on a mobile phone. The E90 is obviously a lot bigger and has acres more space to play with because of a different hinge system but in equal measure, now with an N900 which has less space available, it’s keyboard is still better to use than the N97′s.

There are three factors in my mind at work here. Key travel (the actual amount of depression available to the key, the shape of the key and tactile feedback. The E90 has quite a spongy feeling keyboard to use but the keys are shaped in such a way that reduced miss-keying with their raised bottom bevel edge and equally provide a good amount of travel that reassures the user the key has been pressed. On the N900 there’s not as much key travel which may account for the increase in typos on my Tweets but the raised centre leading down on all sides bevel coupled with a distinctly clicky tactile feedback make up for this.

The N97 in contrast loses out here. The keys are quite small to begin with but have both little travel and less in the way of tactile feedback.

I also had an issue with the layout, often getting a ‘b’ when I wanted a ‘v’.

That said, after a week or so I became accustom to it and these issues subdued but I do think the keyboard could have been better and a lot of potential space has been wasted by including a D-Pad. Which moves us on nicely.

The D-Pad:

I never actually used it in general usage and in my mind it’s fairly redundant outside of perhaps games on a touch screen phone. By all means have cursor keys to fill this function but the D-Pad really wasn’t needed on this handset. Which is probably a good thing because I didn’t particularly like it either. Again spongy, flat, with little travel or tactile feedback and easy to hit a direction when you’re going for select. Not a patch on the clearly defined D-Pads I’ve used on the E90 and E65.

Exterior buttons and sliders:

Back to the good stuff now. Whether functionality wise, tactile feedback wise, the volume switch, power button, menu button, dial and hangup, camera button, lens cover slider and screen-lock slider all felt lovely to use. With only the bit of sideways play in the menu button they all felt solid, well engineered, gave the right amount of resistance and feedback and were in all the right places.

The only thing I’ll add as a note was the that the screen-lock slider took some getting used to as I’ve now become accustomed to the (what I originally though rather silly placing but now quite like) slider on the N900.

Touch Screen:

Here is an area where the cross-over between hardware and software make it harder to judge the quality on the basis of performance as they are significantly intertwined. On the whole, it’s a good responsive touch screen with functionality right up to the edges where some touch screens start to lose sensitivity or not register at all. It’s not as good as the touch screen on the N900 and it loses tracking. By which I mean, if I touch a specific point on my N900 and scroll the screen, the area displayed on the screen stays solidly underneath my finger. On the N97 it did move at a different rate. Not a massive amount, but enough to notice. Whether this loss of synchonisation is a software or a hardware issue is anyone’s guess but I’d probably put it down to software.

With that little quibble out the way, it is nice and responsive with the all important tactile feedback.

Off with the hardware and on to the software:

There will of course be some aspects of internal hardware I’ll have to touch on in this section because they have a bearing on the software and the experience it provides to a user but we’ll get round to that in a little while.

Software wise we’ve got Symbian S60 5th Edition running under the bonnet and it’s actually quite good and functional. I’ll note here, I did try out an N97 when they first came out with the original firmware and I wasn’t impressed. It wasn’t as bad as I subsequently read lots of reviews of it were portraying, but it wasn’t impressive either. The latest firmware which this device had pre-installed (so I didn’t need to flash it upon receipt) is considerably better.

Switching between portrait and landscape on the original firmware was sluggish but here it was nice and snappy as was orientation change when popping out the keyboard.

As far as screen customisation goes, I do like the idea of active widgets although it’s not in the league of the N900 for total customisable layout styles but equally, switching these layouts between landscape and portrait modes actually works really well which I accept would be an entirely different and far more difficult thing to achieve on the N900.

Initial set up was fairly easy with getting hold of my usual (when I was using a Symbian based device) applications through either straight downloads or off the Ovi Store, as was importing contacts from Funambol which meant I had a working handset with everything I’m used to in under an hour.

I have read other reviews that stated music library population and indexing took a lot of time but I didn’t find any kind of problem here, dropping my entire collection (circa 8GB) onto the device in under half an hour and indexing didn’t take more than a minute or two.

Performance:

Another area where the N97 has been criticised mainly along two lines of argument. Lack of RAM (128MB) and lack of any graphic acceleration chipage. I’m probably not the right person to evaluate graphic acceleration capabilities because I don’t tend to bother with games (which are where these are really put to the test) but with the increases in transitional effects and the draw on the core processor, it’s an area where the N97 lacks a bit of future proofing for what’s likely to come.

RAM-wise, for almost anything most people are likely to do with a phone it is adequate but given it’s high profile and the relative cheapness of chips, 256MB really should be on-board. Despite this it still manages to multi-task well with any slowing in performance or hangs only noticeable when it’s being severely tested with a good half a dozen applications open and running at the same time.

Device Application Memory is an issue, it’s really quite small with; from recollection, about 22MB free with a default installation. Enough to get a handful of applications on but not much more. Sure, you can always install applications on mass storage which isn’t short of space but some require installation on device memory and it is preferable to have them there.

Camera:

We’ve got the usual Carl Zeiss optics in place with a 5MPixel camera and it’s good, very good in fact. Balance and richness of images are all there by the bucket-load. I couldn’t think of anything truly exciting to take a sample picture of as it’s not like all the flowers are out yet so here’s a picture of Wolverhampton Police Station and the wall of my house (yes I know it need pointing, I’ll get round to it one day). Even zooming right it, the quality is definitely there which makes it more than capable as an imaging device.

Battery Life:

The N97 comes with 1,500mAh BP-4L battery, same as the one in my E90 so I was expecting good life out of this little beast and it performed well. In my “Let’s try and kill the battery’ test I got it to last a little over 5 hours. This is with half a dozen applications running simultaneously all actively using things like 3G/Wifi connectivity, running music constantly via Bluetooth and with full geo-location GPS tracking going on at the same time. That’s a pretty good result in my book and more than I’d get out of my E90, at least the last time I tried doing that to it.

As for normal usage, it’ll easily see out a day (got it to last 2 days with fairly moderate usage) so no fears of having to carry a charger around or running out in the morning when you wake up.

GPS:

Not a lot to say here, it’s good, finds position in a second or two and stays locked to it which was very handy as I did have to use it for a fair bit of navigational work when I had the handset and with both Ovi Maps and Google Maps it worked great.

Bluetooth:

Again, nothing to grumble about, never dropped any music or calls, nice clear quality, file transfers were painless and range was fully up to scratch.

Data Connectivity:

No grumbles in this department. 3G/3.5G connections performed well where I know they should in the locality and wifi was solid as was switching between the two automatically.

The Pocket Test:

I’m a creature of habit. I like routines. One of which is how I arrange things in my pockets. Usually it’s simple. Things that might scratch my mobile phone like keys, lighters, boxes of matches I’ve long since learnt to segregate so under normal circumstances these go in my right pocket. Wallet and mobile in my left. However with all this stuff in my trouser pockets and dependent on how much small change has accumulated in my wallet, it can get quite cramped in there so the last thing I want is erroneous stuff going on like my phone being accidentally activated, turning off my music or calling someone.

My current N900 fails the pocket test miserably, to the point that I’ve had to resort to putting it in my inside coat pocket which isn’t optimal for me because the slightest rub of wallet against phone against thigh starts and usually completely opens the slider and therefore activates the phone.

The N97 in contrast passes with flying colours, as the slider requires both a small amount of vertical force as well as horizontal force to open. As it’s wedged between wallet and thigh it can’t achieve the vertical force and stays nicely shut. I like that.

Final Conclusions:

Despite reading a fair few articles knocking it, and my own initial impressions of the device it’s certainly gone up in my expectations. It’s not perfect by any means and there’s a few things that I don’t like such as the keyboard (although after a week or so it’s not as bad as I first thought).

It’s got solid build quality and I’m sure could take a fair few knocks over time. Battery life is good, form factor is very nice by my preferences.

It could do with a little more oomph in the power stakes with more RAM in particular to give it that edge and definitely a keyboard with more tactile feedback and travel in the keys. To be precise, the D-Pad should probably not be there and a few extra/bigger keys inserted in its place.

Size and weight wise I like it, enough of a presence to make itself felt in the pocket and known it’s not fallen out or got swiped by a toe-rag.

The OS is functional and performs well. I’m sure people complain about it not being pretty and slick but I still take functionality and capability over effects and prettiness any day.

Looking back, had I bought one as a replacement for my E90 when I was deciding on a new phone, I don’t think I would have been disappointed but equally I don’t think it would have ‘wowwed’ me in the same way the N900 has.

(Another post, including all graphic image cropping [with GIMP] and rendering done on an N900 with the exception of example images which was just easier to do on the desktop).

This is the first of what may become a series of techie reviews. The upshot is, I’ve done a few reviews in the past on books, bits of technology that have either been things I’ve bought myself or those that have been sent to me from companies like Toshiba but Nokia have agreed to send me various bits of kit to play with and generally say what I think ‘which is nice’. (That’s an in joke between me and an old Finnish mate, who coincidentally also works for Nokia).

The deal is, just so everyone’s clear. I don’t get to keep anything, get paid for writing nice things and anyone who has been reading my blog in the past knows I’ll give credit where it’s due but not hold back on criticism or where I think things are lacking.

So here is the little unit in it’s box which is the first area I’d like to comment on.

I know most manufacturers have gone down the road in recent years in reducing packaging which is a very good thing and there’s plenty of recyclable card and plastic in the packaging for the BH-214 but looking at what’s in the box, it’s clear that it’s not the unit itself that takes up the majority of the volume but the charger.

I think there would be a good argument in shipping this device without a charger unit which could really save space and packaging.

The charger in question is a box standard Nokia charger with the small 2mm jack. Odds on anyone purchasing this device already has one of these, I’ve got three, I think.

A better solution would be for the unit itself to have a Micro-USB port that can be used to charge either via PC or the new generation of standardised chargers and ship with a simple adapter cable like came with my N900 to convert between an old 2mm jack charger and Micro-USB.

This could also open up the possibility of extending the function of the device to not only what it is but also allow it to be used as a Bluetooth dongle for a computer, which could be quite handy at times.

With the wishlist out of the way, we come down to the unit itself which is a two tone white and light grey moulded case, clip on the back for attaching to lapels, power button on the top with indicator LED’s, volume control on the side and navigation/call option button on the front.

It comes with a default set of in-ear headphones of the rubbery ear plug variety that seem to come with everything these days.

The headphones are detachable and has a standard 3.5mm audio jack which makes swapping them out for any other earphones easy. I’ll not here, and it’s not a criticism of the produst but I just simple don’t like these rubbery in-ear headphones. Not just the set that came with the BH-214 but all of them. I accept it may just be me and I have funny shaped/small ear canals but I can never get the damn things to stay in.

However as this is a review I persisted with the default headphones for the duration and dropping out aside, the sound quality was particularly good.

Connectivity was flawless in all the devices I tested it with (Nokia N97, E90, 5800 and N900) with no interference of drops in playback with music or calls.

All the functionality worked on the handsets barring the N900 which doesn’t support everything (yet, I hope), but I already knew and expected that.

I had the device for a fortnight and although I didn’t do any specific battery strength tests on it, I did only charge it twice in that time and it still had plenty of juice left after the second charge.

The one thing I did enjoy doing with it was hooking it up to my hifi via the audio jack to aux sockets making it perfectly possible to live stream music direct from my mobile phone which surprisingly lost very little in audio quality compared to a fully wired connection.

This was however a bit of a problem when I got a call and ended up conducting it through the speakers of my hifi which probably felt a little weird to the delivery guy on the other end.

In conclusion the BH-214 is a very nifty little bit of kit. Does what it says on the tin and does it well. Good battery life and offers a few options in connectivity to play about with. For the price it’s not a bad alternative for using to live stream music around the house and turn the concept of a home media server on its head.

The only criticism that I would lay at the device which to be fair is understandable given it’s small size; is the inability to remove the battery (at least I couldn’t figure out a way to remove it). The environmentalist in me likes the ability to change over elements of hardware that will eventually degrade over time which in most electronic devices is the battery so that would have been nice.

(This post was written entirely on a Nokia N900 using WordPress for Maemo 0.5.4a)

I’ve been meaning to get round to a good mobile blogging solution for a while now but haven’t really had the time.
There’s plenty of options and strategies but partly my reason to switch to straight WordPress was based on a desire to get away from the slightly more long-winded approach to mobile blogging on the old system.
Unfortunately it would appear that anything above WordPress 2.5 doesn’t like either of my mobile browsers (box standard Nokia Webkit and Opera Mini) the former crashing on encountering the backed of the site and the latter not being able to select the content section for editing so I’ve been looking around for other solutions.
An interesting solution looked to be a little S60 app called Scribe but although others seem to have had success, it just doesn’t work for me although I’ll keep an eye on it if the Python issues are sorted out.
Finally I’m back to the web based approach with a little plugin called wPhone that simply re-renders the backend for mobile use and as I’m typing this here now it seems stable so without further ado lets try to post this and see how it goes.